The present technology relates to memory devices.
Semiconductor memory devices have become more popular in various electronic devices. For example, non-volatile semiconductor memory is used in cellular telephones, digital cameras, personal digital assistants, mobile computing devices, non-mobile computing devices and other devices.
A charge-storing material such as a floating gate or a charge-trapping material can be used in such memory devices to store a charge which represents a memory state. A charge-trapping material can be arranged vertically in a three-dimensional stacked memory structure, or horizontally in a two-dimensional memory structure. One example of a three-dimensional memory structure is the Bit Cost Scalable (BiCS) architecture which includes a stack of alternating conductive and dielectric layers.
A memory device includes memory cells which may be arranged in strings, for instance, where select gate transistors are provided at the ends of the string to selectively connect a channel of the string to a source line or bit line. However, various challenges are presented in operating such memory devices.